It’s a day of what ifs. Or maybe if onlys. If only out of the long shadow of tragedy and loss had come a different sort of reckoning: the world brought together—as it was, in sympathy on our behalf—not to settle scores with guns, but with the shock and awe of radical justice. What if the oppression that nurtured the hatreds and resentments had, itself, been attacked? What if terrorism had been treated as a violation of international law instead of a strike against national pride?
Today what I’m most remembering that came immediately after is not only the shock of 9/11 but, as some have said, 9/12: the feeling of common fragility, of tenderness, and of charity toward one another. We can’t bring back who was lost, but I wish we could bring back what was.
I’m re-reading a few poems I wrote that now remind me of who we were on 9/12. Here are two:
Iceman
He may have bled to death
there on the mountain:
flint arrowhead imbedded
in carbon-dated
shoulderblade, neolithic
agony echoing down to us
through tectonic shifts,
his computer image
looking like someone
I might have met.
I thought of him again–
I don’t know why–
on a warm afternoon
later that September.
The streets were hushed and
shadowy although the sky
of course, was emptier,
bluer, too, than necessary,
the scent still in the air and
flowers wilting
outside the fire stations,
posters in every window–
someone might yet come home.
In another age
a week before
we had owned small fears,
certainty.
We were young then.
………….
ever since
now
in the fragile time
between the thunder claps
in the time after
the sky split open
and solidness
dissolved
the fire
continues
to leave no one
unscorched
shelter collapses
again and again
around us
the acrid dust
preserves us
perfect as Pompeii
we were gentle
with each other then
liable to break
now we sort through
what is left to us
sift the rubble
for what
we have lost